Actually, no, War of the Worlds was clearly introduced as a drama, not as a real news show. How many actually tuned in after the introduction and believed they were listening to a real broadcast is a separate issue of some mythology … likely actually relatively few.
As to the latter point … so you support limiting the Free Speech of others to some degree? Certainly if it becomes what you would consider harassment.
Let’s now clarify what sort of Free Speech you would limit. What sort of threats? The sort of threats that “progressives” use are generally threats of boycott or visible protest. Are those forbidden? Why do you limit the publication of truthful information about others done as a form of speech?
Here’s the thing that annoys me: many of all stripes are in favor of free speech, so long as free speech means the freedom for them to say what they want. When it comes to the freedom of others to say that which they do not want to hear … not so much so.
Burning an American flag is, for example, a sort of speech that I find objectionable, and many more conservative than I am much more so. While a progressive might protest someone’s speech that they do not like, or boycott a business, the conservative response to speech they did not like was a very popular movement to make the burning of the flag against the law: Free Speech so long as it is something I want to hear.
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Let’s now clarify what sort of Free Speech you would limit. What sort of threats? The sort of threats that “progressives” use are generally threats of boycott or visible protest. Are those forbidden? Why do you limit the publication of truthful information about others done as a form of speech?
Here’s the thing that annoys me: many of all stripes are in favor of free speech, so long as free speech means the freedom for them to say what they want. When it comes to the freedom of others to say that which they do not want to hear … not so much so.
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Definitely, many or most people would be happy to have unlimited freedom for themselves rather then for others. Definitely, there are still many grey areas in what constitutes Free Speech versus harassment.
Many practices, like pressuring major media sources not to publish some things are de facto censorship.
Reminds me of this Orson Scott Card essay where he makes up a story that Obama is going to recruit inner city gang members into a paramilitary police force answering only to him and declare himself dictator for life. And then he says that the story isn’t true, or course. But the fact that the story sounds like to could be true proves that Obama is a fascist, because if he weren’t a fascist we’d think the story was ridiculous, but since the story doesn’t seem ridiculous to Card it just goes to show how awful Obama is.
Many world changing works of literature were written in prison. Goldberg may well have the opportunity to record his struggle if he does serve a long sentence.
At best, the conservative writer takes one casual encounter with one particularly shrill liberal and holds it up as exemplary of the breed. And at that point, it hardly makes a difference in terms of persuasiveness to anyone with an ounce of skepticism whether the shrill liberal actually existed or was a figment of the writer’s imagination, but it goes from being an intellectual sin to a moral sin on the writer’s part if the latter is true.
And we liberals don’t need to make up random conservatives, when we’ve got the remarks of plenty of nutty Republican Presidential candidates and members of Congress to choose from. It’s a target-rich environment.
And I was hoping you could share a couple of 'em. Can you dumb 'em down a bit and summarize some here? 